Sherrod Brown has been calling for universal health care since 1992. That's when he first ran for a U.S. House seat in Ohio, vowing to decline the federally subsidized insurance for members of Congress until his constituents could get similar coverage. He won that race and he kept that pledge, buying policies on his own until 2011 , after the Affordable Care Act became law.

He was a senator by that point, and like every other Democrat in the chamber, he voted for President Barack Obama s signature health care law. But before Brown did that, he promoted a series of proposals designed to make the program more generous and comprehensive. One of them was a last-minute amendment that would have replaced Obamacares intricate scheme for competing private insurers with a Medicare for all program, under which everybody would enroll in a government-run insurance plan.

Nobody seriously thought Democrats were about to scrap legislation they had spent nearly a year writing. By supporting the amendment, Brown was mostly trying to demonstrate his commitment to improving the Affordable Care Act, if not before it became law, then afterward. It was a symbolic act, but a conspicuous one, with only one other senator co-sponsoring it.

The amendments author was Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), the most visible champion of Medicare for all. In 2016 he made the idea a centerpiece of his presidential campaign, and a year later, he introduced a new version of Medicare for all legislation this time, with 16 co-sponsors, proving just how popular the idea had become in the interim.